Agencification and Performance: The Impact of Autonomy and Result-Control on the Performance of Executive Agencies in Korea

Agencification, the practice of creating semi-autonomous public bodies based on a contractual relationship with a parent government, has spread across the industrialized and developing world. The main principles of this NPM-based reform are autonomy and result control. This study uses regression analysis with data from forty-four executive agencies in Korea to examine the effect of these factors on organizational performance. The results show that both human resource management autonomy and financial autonomy have statistically significant negative relationships with performance, whereas systems for performance evaluation and rewards for result control are significantly and positively related to the performance of executive agencies in Korea.